Not Functional or Elegant
by nb41
Summary: Jane Foster has worked some bad jobs in her career; working with Stark Industries' R&D is a vast improvement.


For this prompt at comment_fic: Any, any, "Code Monkey" - Jonathan Coulton

Much rather wake up, eat a coffee cake  
Take bath, take nap  
This job "fulfilling in creative way"  
Such a load of crap

- Jonathan Coulton, _Code Monkey_

In the first Thor movie Jane mentions she built most of her equipment herself, which says to me that she's skilled in hardware, firmware, and software design, so I ran with that. Also, there's breakfast, because coffee cake.

* * *

"Foster."

Jane jerks awake in her chair, and is disoriented for a moment as her unplanned nap at her desk wears off, leaving her in the Tower's 40th floor lab. Dawn is just lightening the sky outside the windows, and Tony is standing there in the same clothes he was wearing last night.

"Don't do that," she says, and rubs at her face. As if to apologize, he offers her a cup of coffee-it smells fresh, not reheated-which she accepts with mumbled thanks.

He sits on the edge of her desk. "So. How long do we have before Thor and Pepper bribe, threaten, or blackmail someone from S.H.I.E.L.D. into reprogramming JARVIS so he locks us out for a month."

Jane yawns and stretches. Her neck has a kink in it which is going to make the day superbly frustrating. "Pretty sure they're already working on it."

"Well. I guess we need to get this done then."

Jane gives her monitors, full of debugging output and crash reports, a sullen look. Beyond them sit the sensors and monitoring equipment the software is meant to run, all of it stubbornly refusing to work to specifications. At this point she's pretty sure there's gremlins involved.

"Shower first," she says. "And breakfast."

Tony slides off the desk. "Only if there's eggs."

"Omelets."

"With toast and bacon."

"Sausage."

"Bacon _and_ sausage."

Jane levers herself out of her chair and stretches. "Deal."

They ride the elevator up in companionable, exhausted, post-all-nighter silence to the floor where Jane shares a modest apartment with Thor. As she gets out, Tony says, "If you don't show up is it safe to assume he's holding you hostage?"

Jane rolls her eyes at him as the doors shut.

* * *

To keep herself from starving over the summers of graduate school where she has no funding, she takes odd programming and hardware design jobs, mostly 3-month contract spots at this company or that non-profit. Her skills are varied, which lets her pick and choose.

The firmware position at a medical devices company is the best, and they try to talk her in to staying on. She gives it at least ten minutes of serious thought, but she's not sure she likes the Pacific Northwest to begin with, and in the end it's astrophysics that speaks to her. It's a good notch in her belt, though, what with writing firmware for ultrasounds and x-ray machines, and they treat her with the most respect she ever has in the business of software development. Thus, every other position turns out to be an enormous let-down.

The worst is the web application gig at a mid-sized software company in La Jolla. It's really a horrible job, and if it weren't for the fact that she wants to get at least some web application experience she'd have dropped it after the second day. They expect anyone not an FTE to work the same ridiculous hours _as_ the FTEs, all without the benefits and bonus and parking space. This means long nights any time a release is coming up, endless rounds of testing, and no real compensation for the lost sleep or lack of a personal life.

And that doesn't even get into the bullshit from the other developers. She's handed the baby tasks, the menial work; the kinds of things you give Intern Joe, not Experienced Developer With Three Product Releases Jane. There will be no deep end of the pool for her, not with this lot, just fixing other, past contractors' bad decisions (or maybe that's 'decisions made in anger'). Also, the coffee cake is always stale, and the coffee itself disgusting even when freshly made.

She doesn't want to deal with recruiters and interviews again, though, so she toughs it out, and at the end of August swears she will never again in her whole adult life put up with that kind of work situation, not ever.

Thor's sleep schedule is erratic at best, which suits Jane fine, because it means when she does things like work until dawn he doesn't take it personally.

He's reading from one of the science history books he's borrowed from her mom's library when she comes in, and looks like he's just showered, which probably means he was training with Natasha or Steve. (Unlike herself, Tony, or Thor, they get up with the sun on purpose.) He smiles at her when she comes in and sets the book down on the coffee table. "Do you emerge from battle victorious?"

"Battle's still raging. Just without me for a little bit." She knows it will be a bad idea to not get straight into the shower, but he looks pretty comfortable on the loveseat by the window, so she settles next to him. It's not long before she's curled up in his lap and half-dozing with his shoulder as a pillow and he's reading again. At some point she starts to wake up a little more, maybe from the sunlight coming in through the window, and says, "Tony thinks you and Pepper are scheming to lock us out of the labs."

"Pepper would require no help from me to carry out such a plan."

"That's not a no, is it."

Thor makes a low 'mmm' sound, though when he speaks she can hear a smile in his voice. "I would not presume to keep you from your work."

She yawns and pats his arm. "You're the best."

* * *

They don't get around to ending her contract; instead, she conveniently forgets to tell them about school coming up, and bails in the middle of a team meeting in Office Space-esque fashion.

Intern Joe asks her in a hushed voice, "Did you really just do that?" as she marches down the hall with him dogging her heels.

"Sure did."

"But they want to go live next week!"

She stops and turns to face him, and he has to back-pedal to avoid running into her. He's only 21, and to Jane he looks more like 15. "Joe, you're a smart kid, and maybe the only other developer I've worked with here who's not a complete jerk, so I'm going to give you some advice-get away from these people. They're horrible. This is a bad workplace. Go find yourself somewhere that they respect their employees and treat them like human beings and not code vending machines."

He stares at her with wide eyes, and she relents. "I'll email you my project notes. We both know they're going to try to dump this on you. But get out of here. Find a good employer. You don't need to take this kind of crap."

He swallows. She says, "Trust me. You'll be fine. You're good at this."

People are starting to peer out of their offices. Joe looks around them at the attention they're garnering, then nods. "Thanks."

"Don't mention it."

Jane heads for her desk, squelches the urge to send a company-wide email about how much of a jackass her manager is, gathers her things, and leaves. All without setting fire to her workstation or flipping anyone off.

* * *

The only reason Jane doesn't fall completely asleep in Thor's lap while he continues reading is because there was a promise of something breakfast-like, and she's hungrier than she is tired. Her stomach finally compels her towards the shower, and he doesn't delay her, but instead joins her downstairs. He helps Bruce cook while she and Tony nurse their coffee and Pepper prepares for her workday by going through the two hundred emails that need her urgent attention.

"Do you do anything but answer email?" Tony asks Pepper. Jane might be imagining it, but he seems a little put out Pepper is working already.

"Occasionally I have conference calls."

"Maybe we need to hire you an assistant."

"I have one. And he has an assistant of his own, too."

"And still you have all this email to deal with."

Pepper narrows her eyes at him. "I'd better not find out a bunch of legitimate email is being filtered out by the servers before it even gets to me like it was last month."

"Those were all spam messages."

"Some of them weren't. The ones from Morris Plutarch weren't spam."

Tony scoffs. "_Anything_ from him is spam."

"He's a business peer, Tony, we can't just pretend he doesn't exist."

"I am pretty sure we can. Actually I am completely _certain_ we can."

Bruce attempts to distract Tony by putting a loaded down plate in front of him. "This is why you're doing R&D and she's running the company," Bruce reminds him.

"Whatever. Deleting email from Plutarch without opening it is a valid business decision."

Pepper gives him a fond (if also long-suffering) look and sips from her coffee. She thanks Bruce for her plate of toast, eggs, and bacon, and nibbles from it in between fits of typing. Tony eats with the focus of someone who has big plans for the day, and Jane suspects some of them involve a new series of filters for the Stark Industries email servers.

Thor brings over a plate for himself and Jane, and Jane almost finishes her huge omelet of mushrooms, onions, peppers, cheddar, and chorizo before Thor gets to his toast (and remembers half-way through that she didn't have dinner the night before, so gets herself a second helping of bacon).

Once everyone's done eating, Bruce and Thor get to cleaning up, and Tony and Jane head for the lab with bottles of water (Bruce's idea) and a coffee cake from the bakery across the street (Pepper's idea). They deposit the cake in the kitchenette and are back to work after spending a few minutes to figure out a road map of what to address next.

It's a very good coffee cake. The plate holds nothing but crumbs by lunchtime.


End file.
